Erica Jenkins

Cognitive growth in Children

List three of the four layers of Bronfenbrenner's (1979) model of the social context of development, and give an example of how each layer can influence the development of a child's academic abilities.

The first layer of Bronfenbrenner's model is the microsystem. This is the child's family life or home life that can directly impact the child's life and development. This layer can influence the child's academic abilities, positively or negatively, by giving the child anything he or she needs to help develop those academic abilities. If the child has a strong family unit where both parents have high incomes that they can use to hire a good tutor for their child to help them advance in school then this gives the child an advantage in his or her academic abilities where they have a better chance of succeeding than parents who make a low income and work constantly decreasing the time they are able to spend with their child to help them with his or her school work.

The second layer is the mesosystem where the Microsystems come into contact with each other in a way that they can have an impact on the child. This can impact a child's academic ability because if a child has trouble connecting with his or her peers at school and his or her parents at home do not show any concern for the child's lack of friends at school then this will hurt the child to not be responsive to his or her parents regarding his or her grades and will cause the child to perform poorly in school. Likewise, if a child's parents do care about their child's lack of friends and switches him or her to another school the child may become happier that his or her parents care and will continue to perform well in school or will increase his or her performance in school.

The third layer of Bronfenbrenner's model is the exosystem, which is the system that has an indirect impact on the child. So if a child was placed in an expensive private school that focused on harvesting academic abilities and achievements and the child's parents loses their jobs forcing them to pull the child out of the school, this will have a harsh affect on the child. He or she might have trouble making friends or might feel that the school is not helping them the same way that his or her other school was able to help them. This causing the child to not grow academically or might actually cause the child to revert and decrease his or her growth where the child is performing worse than she or she was. In other words, if a child's parents obtain a new job that can afford to send their child to a special school for them to focus on their academics then the child may end up performing better.

List the four main stages of Piaget's theory, along with their relevant age ranges. Describe one significant limitation of children's thinking in each of the first three stages.

The first stage of Piaget's theory is the sensorimotor stage which happens at the birth of a child up until the child is two years old. This stage focuses on the child trying to understand her or his environment and the world. The main limitation of thinking in this stage is the child developing object permanence, where he or she knows that an object is still there and still exits even if it is hidden. This stage also explains that children are only beginning to understand the way life works for them.

The second stage is the preoperational stage which happens at age 2 and lasts until age 7. The limitation in this stage is the child's inability to see things from another person's point of view. If a child likes to eat bananas then that child will think that everyone likes to eat bananas.

The third stage is the concrete operational stage which lasts from age 7 until age 11. This stage's limitations are that a child may understand how certain things happen but they cannot predict why they happen. A child may know that if you ring a bell a dog will become hungry which will cause the dog to produce saliva. But the child will not link; if you ring a bell a dog will produce saliva.